German Corporate Entrepreneurs in Nineteenth Century America (1800-1899)

Many of the Germans who came to the United States in the nineteenth century were entrepreneurs, some in the more mundane sense of owning their own businesses, others in the more exciting sense of being innovators within various business sectors. Germans also appear to have been more likely to engage in entrepreneurial activities on a scale large enough to require the formation of corporations. That hypothesis stems from the analysis of a database of the names of several hundred thousand incorporators, people (mostly men) who helped for-profit businesses to receive special charters granted by state legislatures across the United States between 1790 and 1861.

Many of the Germans who came to the
United States in the nineteenth century were entrepreneurs, some in the more
mundane sense of owning their own businesses, others in the more exciting sense
of being innovators within various business sectors. Although drawing
comparisons with other immigrant groups is fraught with difficulties, it seems
that Germans were more likely to be self-employed than most other immigrant groups
of the era, especially the Irish, Italians, or Chinese, who tended to be
poorer, less educated, and more likely to work for others in sectors like construction
or manufacturing. (Mining was something of an exception in areas like Western
Pennsylvania). Germans also appear to have been more likely to engage in
entrepreneurial activities on a scale large enough to require the formation of
corporations. That hypothesis stems from the analysis of a database of the
names of several hundred thousand incorporators, people (mostly men) who helped
for-profit businesses to receive special charters granted by state legislatures
across the United States between 1790 and 1861.[1]

Throughout the nineteenth century,
German-initiated and German-run businesses engaged in a wide variety of
business activities from banking to brewing, insurance underwriting to
publishing, and manufacturing to agricultural production. Some entrepreneurs
found formal incorporation unnecessary but others, especially those that wished
to pool the capital of large numbers of their neighbors and other investors,
obtained corporate charters in order to pursue their business ventures.

While it proved impossible to verify the
birthplaces of most incorporators with core Germanic surnames (see Appendix A)
in the 1790-1861 database, enough could be traced genealogically to verify that
first- and second-generation German Americans chartered numerous corporations
in the first half of the nineteenth century. Secondary sources verify that German
immigrants remained active in the corporate sector in the second half of the
century as well, a fact reinforced by the large number of corporations in
operation in the early twentieth century that contained words like “German” and
“Germania” (see Appendix B) in their names. A few years later, most of the
corporations removed “German” from their names to escape the anti-German
sentiments stirred up during World War I, part of a long process whereby most corporations
–German or otherwise – cleansed themselves of ethnic associations during the
twentieth century.

In her 1895 short story, “Washington’s
Birthday at Hardyville,” Annie Fellows-Johnston blasted German immigrants for
being unpatriotic and less interested in schooling their children than in
making a buck. All that German immigrants “care about,” protagonist Mr. Hardy
claimed, “is having their corn and stock turn out well.” Mrs. Hardy agreed that
“They usually force the boys and girls to live like overworked horses. All they
think of is making money.”[2]

Although subjected to stereotypes like
that proffered by Fellows-Johnston, many of the Germans who moved to America in
the nineteenth century were attracted by high wages, cheap land, and, perhaps
most of all, political and economic freedoms.[3]
Typically, the profit motive drove German immigrants to work hard, as
Fellows-Johnston discerned, but also to work smart, transforming some of them
from mere farmers into innovative agricultural entrepreneurs.[4]
In Cullman County in northern Alabama, for example, German farmers moved in
after federal troops moved out and the railroads started to move through in the
wake of the Civil War. In the late 1860s and 1870s, they introduced new crops
like strawberries and wine grapes to the area.[5]
German immigrants, both those directly from traditional German-speaking lands
in Central Europe and those who came to America via the Russian Black Sea
region, were also a potent force on the western frontier. Many worked the
railroads before taking homesteads in the Dakotas,[6]
where, in contrast to Hardyville, they became esteemed members of their
respective communities due to their strong work ethic and business acumen.[7]
Newly-arrived Germans were so valued that Dakota and other territories hired agents in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago to steer to them to the Great
Plains.[8]

Dakota homesteader George Beine
remembered that one couple had emigrated from German Bohemia, “as had their
neighbors, and spoke only a few words of English.” The husband, he recalled,
“was a small man but… he spent his time making various items – harnesses from
hides, cups from tin cans with the handles ingeniously formed of willow, a set
of table knives from an old saw, a butcher knife from a file – furnishing the
house with the products of his skill.”[9]
Another homesteader, Grace Fairchild, recalled that “Old Lady Stuffenberg lived
on a claim at the southwest corner of our land. She had been born in Germany,
but had come over here several years before.” Stuffenberg made good beer and
great blood sausage. “Somehow,” Fairchild remembered, “she had put together a
smoke house and smoked all her meat. Nothing but the squeal was lost when Old
Lady Stuffenberg butchered a hog.”[10]

Still another early Dakotan recalled that
a German native named William Landers (née Lenders) had lived in several
eastern states before coming to Dakota Territory in 1884, where he settled on
Hat Creek south of the Black Hills and raised livestock. Landers was said to be
the “first rancher to build fences and dams in the region [and] soon acquired a
second place on Ash Creek, a tributary of Hat Creek, about twenty-three miles
south of Hot Springs.” Landers died in 1904 with about 500 head of cattle
bearing his brand.[11]

An even bigger German stock outfit in southwestern
South Dakota, one of the biggest in the region in fact, was that of Oelrichs
and Company. In 1798, a member of the Oelrichs family of Schleswig-Holstein
moved to New York City to establish a branch of the family mercantile business
there. In 1837, Henry Oelrichs permanently emigrated from Bremen to Baltimore
to help run a steamship ticket agency that was a major player on several Euro-American
passenger routes into the twentieth century.[12]
(It was prominent enough that newspaper editors asked its general manager about
safety reforms in the wake of the Titanic
disaster.[13]) From
there his business and his sons spread west and into the burgeoning cattle
business.[14]

Many other German immigrants ended up
establishing large businesses like Oelrichs and Company and even formally
chartered corporations, which by the U.S. Civil War were already ubiquitous.
Contrary to long-standing, but erroneous, assumptions, antebellum America did
not suffer a general dearth of “capital” in any sense of the term but rather
abounded in human, physical, and even financial resources. Interest rates were
higher than in older economies, like those of Britain and the Netherlands,
because investment funds could be put to numerous profitable uses in America’s
dynamic, expanding economy.[15]
Except in the aftermath of financial panics in 1819, 1837, and 1857, ably-led
projects received the funding they needed: short term from banks, intermediate term
from bondholders, and long term from equity holders.[16]
German immigrants and their descendants became important borrowers and securities
issuers and depositors and investors in America’s financial system as early as
the colonial period.

In the eighteenth century, Germans poured
into Pennsylvania. Some then moved south along the Shenandoah into backcountry
Maryland and Virginia, where with Scots-Irish immigrants they comprised up to thirty
percent of the free population.[17]
By 1790, Pennsylvania was home to over 140,000 German-born residents, more than
half of the 264,000 or so residents counted in the federal census that year. By
then, Virginia, Maryland, and New York had about 25,000 German-born residents
each, and North Carolina and New Jersey had about 15,000 each.[18]
In each state where they had a major presence, Germans were customers of early
banks and brokers.[19]

In the nineteenth century, the locus of
German immigration shifted and with it the region of their greatest impact on
the corporate economy. By 1850, almost twenty-one percent of all German-born
residents in the United States lived in New York. Ohio was second at nineteen
percent and Pennsylvania a distant third at just under fourteen percent. Missouri
was then home to just under eight percent of all Germans residing in America,
Illinois to just under seven percent, and Wisconsin and Indiana to six and five
percent, respectively. About two-fifths of all German-born individuals residing
in America lived in the Northeast, while another two-fifths resided in the
Upper Midwest, leaving only twenty percent in the South.[20]
Many Germans disliked competing with free blacks or slaves for jobs[21]
and, while a few owned slaves, most leaned ideologically toward abolition or at
least away from slaveholding.[22]
When opportunities in the Northeast declined, therefore, Germans quickly flooded
into the Upper Midwest. By 1841, for example, Hermann Reuthlisberger was
brewing beer in Milwaukee.[23]
Before the Civil War, sizeable numbers of German immigrants ended up as far
west as St. Paul, Minnesota, and the surrounding hinterland, where they soon
dominated the building and brewing trades. In an oft-repeated pattern, the
better-off established themselves in fur or lumber trading, retail,
hospitality, law, or finance.[24]

Over a third of the Germans who entered
Pennsylvania between 1785 and 1820 paid for their voyage by entering servitude
and hence were employed by entrepreneurs rather than engaging in
entrepreneurial activities themselves.[25]
Apparently, many continued to struggle economically even after paying their
dues; as late as the mid-1830s, only the Irish outnumbered Germans in
Baltimore’s almshouses.[26]
For a variety of reasons, however, servitude virtually ended after 1820.[27]
After about 1835, relatively few German immigrants, about one in four, worked
as unskilled laborers, and more than two in five made their primary living by
working their own farms.[28]
Most others were relatively highly educated – skilled in a manual trade and
literate – and immigrated with a little working capital. They therefore worked
as attorneys, doctors, or financiers, or as artisans, bakers, brewers, miners,
or tradesmen, or as grocers, hoteliers, real estate developers and speculators,
restaurateurs, or wholesalers.[29]
In other words, many Germans in antebellum America possessed the human and
financial capital requisite to found small businesses organized as
proprietorships or partnerships.[30]
(According to several scholars, German Jews were especially likely to run their
own companies due to the employment discrimination they had faced in Europe.[31])

Entrepreneurs who organized their
businesses as sole proprietorships, general partnerships, or limited
partnerships could slowly accumulate considerable fortunes. Frederick Bodmann
(1801-1874), who came to America from Hanau near Frankfurt am Main in 1822,
amassed a fortune of several million dollars by making, wholesaling, and
retailing tobacco products in Cincinnati and by carefully plowing profits back
into that and other businesses. Eventually, his son Charles took over the
business while another son moved to Brussels, Belgium, to engage in trade.[32]
However, these business forms had legal and financial restrictions that limited
their flexibility and prevented them from growing rapidly.

Proprietorships and partnerships were
able to borrow from banks and could issue debt and equity, but only in
relatively small sums and in their most illiquid forms. To grow large quickly
and benefit from economies of scale, entrepreneurs had to issue more liquid
forms of debt and equity, bonds and stocks that could be traded easily between
investors without triggering firm dissolution. To do that, they had to formally
incorporate by obtaining a charter from a state government. Incorporation
brought with it several legal benefits, including the right of perpetual
succession (the right to change owners without dissolving and reforming the
company every time), entity shielding (which protected corporations and their
creditors from bankrupt stockholders), and defined liability (which protected
stockholders from bankrupt corporations). All three of those legal benefits
made the issuance of easily tradable stocks and bonds possible.[33]

Obtaining a charter typically meant
convincing the state legislature to enact a special law. Most non-financial
charter applications passed with little difficultly but occasionally opposition
arose for competitive or partisan reasons. Several score
residents of Clark County, for example, petitioned the Ohio legislature against
the incorporation of the Springfield Hydraulic Company.[34]
In March 1850 the bill passed anyway and the firm was capitalized at
$200,000, with help from Levi Rineheart,
Thomas Kizer (1812-unknown, born in Clark County, near German Township, to
Virginia parents[35]),Daniel Hertzler (from the heavily German populated Lancaster County in
Pennsylvania, a Mennonite and an agricultural entrepreneur of considerable
wealth[36]),
and others, including James L. Torbert from Pennsylvania, who was second-generation
Scots-Irish.[37]

Entrepreneurs could also form unchartered
associations that claimed the benefits of incorporation via contract.[38]
Numerous entrepreneurs pursued this approach, but almost always only until a
formal charter could be passed by the legislature. A third approach was to
obtain a charter under a general incorporation statute. That became the preferred
path after the Civil War, but in the antebellum era only a few states mandated
general incorporation and some offered no such option. Before the Civil War, at
most 10,000 businesses incorporated under general incorporation laws while over
22,000 incorporated by means of special charters. Most were joint-stock
companies owned by their stockholders but a considerable percentage of banks,
insurers, and cemeteries took the mutual form and hence were technically owned
by their customers.[39]

Antebellum joint-stock corporations,
including those formed by Germans, usually raised equity capital via a direct
public offering (DPO) of stock. In other words, they sold shares in themselves
directly to investors without the aid of an intermediary such as an investment
bank. They typically did so by advertising the names of stock subscription
agents (people associated with the management of the corporation often
explicitly mentioned in the charter) or by advertising a time and place where
subscription books would be opened. Interested members of the public would then
approach a subscription agent or appear at the advertised spot and purchase
options called scripts (sometimes scrips), usually for a dollar or two apiece.
The script allowed the holder to purchase full-fledged shares by making
installment payments on the stock when called for by the board of directors up
to the par value of the shares as specified in the corporation’s charter. If
progress stalled, stockholders could minimize their losses by withholding further
installment payments or use the threat of nonpayment to induce corporate
officers to exert more effort.[40]

Of the subscription and stockholder lists
that have survived, many are laden with German surnames, especially in states
with large German populations. Of a list of 52,547 individuals who invested in
Pennsylvania DPOs between 1814 and 1850, for example, 898 bore core Germanic
surnames like Baer (Bair, Bare, Bear, Beer), Conrad, Freytag, Gulick, Huber,
Kuntz, Saeger (Sager), Schenck (Schenk, Shenk), and so forth. [41]
Although less than two percent of the total, many German investors were missed in the
database search because their names were unintentionally corrupted or
intentionally Anglicized, rendering them nearly impossible to identify without
arduous additional genealogical research.[42]
Others overlooked in the search bore less common surnames not represented in
the core surname list provided in Appendix A. On the other hand, the core
surname methodology overestimates the influence of German immigrants because some investors with Germanic surnames
undoubtedly stemmed from families who had lived in America for several
generations or bore surnames also common among Dutch or Swiss immigrants and
their ancestors. The closest student of the Pennsylvania DPO lists, historian
John Majewski, did not attempt to analyze the country of origin of stockholders
but he did note that Lancaster County, an area of high German-speaking
concentration, was over-represented in the stockholder lists.[43]

Numerous individuals with core German
surnames, 1,038 to be precise, can also be found in the 8,080 special charters
that explicitly listed the stock subscription agents charged with selling
scripts to the public. That includes people with surnames like Brough, Cline,
Fister, Gebhart, Henning, Kurtz, Noble, Reeder, Stump, Werner, and Wever.
Again, however, the count can only be suggestive because some German stock
subscription agents bore names that had been anglicized or corrupted or were
not included in the core list in Appendix A. Others were two, three, or more
generations removed from the Old World. Cross listing several hundred thousand
names with census manuscripts for country of origin proved impractical and
would not be definitive anyway, though I am certain that a technologically
savvy graduate student someday will create a credible method for further
refining the estimates provided here.[44]

The emphasis in this article is on
incorporators from German-speaking lands or with German roots who were
explicitly identified in antebellum business charters as company founders, of
which there were 1,226 using the surname methodology described above. Due to
the inherent difficulties of identifying the country of origin of specific
individuals, the approach will be more anecdotal than statistical: I more or
less randomly identified incorporators with German surnames, attempted (with
help from GHI interns) to confirm their origins, and researched the general
outlines of the companies that they helped to form. The picture that emerges,
while statistically imprecise, is nevertheless quite clear: German immigrants
and their descendants (generically referred to as German Americans below) were
important contributors to antebellum America’s largest, most dynamic, and most
important business enterprises, its corporations.

That is not to say, however, that all
German immigrants fully comprehended the American system of free enterprise.
John F. Amelung moved from Bremen to Baltimore in 1784 to establish a glass
manufactory that employed 350 workers. Rather than incorporating, however, he
begged the Maryland and federal governments for subsidies. The former granted
him a small loan and a tax break but the latter had neither the will nor the
means to help. Amelung’s concern languished after fire destroyed his factory in
1789.[45]
In a similarly misguided effort, some German immigrants attempted to replicate
Old World cooperative enterprises – like communal or employee-owned shops and craft
guilds -- in Manhattan, Buffalo, and elsewhere, but met with little success.[46]

Probably the most famous German corporate
entrepreneur in the antebellum period was John Jacob Astor (1763-1848). Born
near Heidelberg in the small town of Walldorf in the Margraviate of Baden, Astor
immigrated to the United States in March 1784, soon after its independence was
officially won. In 1808, he was the sole incorporator of the American Fur
Company, a corporation chartered in New York. The charter authorized Astor to
raise from $500,000 to $2 million in equity capital (approximately $9.2 to 37
million in 2011$), an enormous sum for the time, especially for a non-financial
corporation.[47]
(The fur trade attracted other Germans as well, including Johann August “John”
Sutter, who was born in Baden in 1803.[48])
American Fur thrived, aiding Astor in his speculations in real estate and other
endeavors, including several more corporate forays.[49]
In 1830, Astor helped to charter New York Life Insurance and Trust Company, a
$1 million New York corporation. Two years later, he was an incorporator in the
Northwestern Insurance Company, another New York company, capitalized at
$150,000. In 1839, Astor helped to charter Portsmouth Dry Dock and Steamboat
Basin Company in Scioto County, Ohio, a $2 million corporation.[50]

Other German Americans also dominated a
few antebellum U.S. corporations. In 1832, for example, William Baer, Michael
S. Baer, and Frederick Augustus Schley (1789-1858) received a charter for
Baer’s Chymical [sic] Works of Baltimore, a manufacturer with an authorized
capital of $300,000.[51]
(Schley’s father was born in the German lands but no information about the
national origins of the other two could be found.) By the following year, the
operation was advertising at No. 83 Pratt Street that “any kind of preparation”
would be “punctually attended to.”[52]
Michael S. was a published doctor[53]
and the grand marshal of the Baltimore Freemasons.[54]
Schley, whose family had settled in Frederick, Maryland, in 1735,[55]
was an attorney with a large and lucrative practice who stood six foot two. His
son, George, a graduate of the University of Virginia, studied and practiced
chemistry at the works for half a year.[56]
(Not everyone involved in the company, however, was German American. An owner
of 884 shares in the concern was Evan Poultney (1795-1838),[57]
a banker of English Quaker extraction who helped to bankrupt the venerable Bank
of Maryland in March 1834.[58])

Similarly, in 1835, Matthias N.
Forney, Henry Meyers, Peter Muller, Henry C. Wampler, David Diehl, Daniel
Barnitz, William Bair, Daniel P. Lange, Peter Winebrenner, William D. Gobrecht,
George Gitt, John L. Hinkle, Benjamin Welsh, Adam Alt, Samuel Trone, Jacob Hilt,
and David Slagle of Hanover Borough and Samuel Hornish, George Eichelberger,
and Charles Cremer of Heidelberg Township, York County, chartered the Hanover
Saving Fund Society. (No genealogical information about most of those men could
be found, but Muller was possibly born in the German lands and several others
probably had German or Swiss ancestors.) With an authorized capitalization
range of $10,000 to $50,000, this Pennsylvania savings bank outlived the
nineteenth century and survived World War II.[59]
As late as 1915 its statutory capital remained a relatively paltry $50,000, but
its surplus was $200,000 and it was paying dividends of seven percent on each
of its 5,000 shares outstanding.[60]
Most of its officers and directors still bore Germanic surnames like Wirt,
Schmidt, and Winebrenner.[61]
Most or all, though, were by then at least several generations removed from the
Old World.[62]

Frederick Walter set out for the
California gold fields in 1850 with eight other young men, all of German birth
or ancestry, and formed a mining company with them. Walter soon abandoned the
mines, however, to start the Pacific Brewery, which thrived despite intense
competition from other breweries, most also run by German immigrants. Walter
returned to mining after a fire destroyed his brewery in 1854. He used his
mining profits to rebuild the brewery facility and by 1858 was making $20,000 a
year from his new brewery and a related business, the Harmony Saloon, which was
run by German immigrant A. M. Kruttschnitt.[63]
Fires and floods continued to dog Walter’s operations but in 1865 he paid $650
in federal income taxes, suggesting an annual income north of $15,000, a hefty
sum for the time. He sold the Pacific Brewery later that year to pursue a
career in politics.[64]

The Sonora Exploring and Mining Company of
Arizona Territory was chartered in Ohio in 1857 and capitalized at $2 million.[65]
It, too, was run mostly by German immigrants, a mixture of Jews and Gentiles.[66]
The former group included Nathan B. Appel (1828-1901), who was born in
Hochstadt on Main, but moved to Arizona in the 1850s and soon after took a
Hispanic wife. Unsurprisingly, Appel was fluent in German, French, Spanish, and
English.[67]
The first president of the company was Samuel Peter Heintzelman (1805-1880) of
Mannheim, Pennsylvania, one of the territory’s U.S. Army commanders.[68]
Although aided by German engineering talent like Herman Ehrenberg, the Sonora
never made a profit, partly because of the remote location of its best mine,
the Heintzelman.[69]

Other companies also appear to have been
formed primarily by men of German ancestry. For example, the Metamora Building
Association of Maryland, chartered in 1850, listed the following incorporators:
Frederick Heinz, Henry F. Hoffman, Conrad Schlott, Henry Weisbach,
Henry Vey, John C. Ermold, Ludwig Waidner, George Puhl, John Zinkan, Henry
Heidrich, Jacob Schafer, George D. Volkmar, Conrad Moeller, and William Mensel.
(Most of these men were from Hesse-Kassel

Some
German-dominated corporations wore their national identity on their sleeve by
putting some variant of the word German into their name. In 1854, for example, Robert Ernst (possibly Bavarian), Laudin Eseuman, Phillip
Tompert (from Wurttemburg), G. Phillip Doern (from the Duchy of Nassau), Lewis
Rehm (from Wurttemburg), Gustavus Stein, Jacob Lavall (German but precise
origin unknown), John Durkee, Conrad Shroeder, John J. Felker (born somewhere
in German lands), Herman Justi, Frederick Schmidt, Orville Turman, and several
others chartered the German Insurance Company of Louisville, Kentucky. With an
authorized capitalization range of $100,000 to $500,000, the company survived
the Civil War and by 1870 had assets of almost $950,000.[70]
It established a bank, the German Security Bank, in 1867, which it spun off at
the behest of insurance regulators in 1871.[71]
It changed its name to Liberty Insurance in 1917 in response to wartime
anti-German sentiments.[72]

The German Land Association of Minnesota,
which was chartered in 1857 with an authorized capitalization range of $100,000
to $500,000, was started by William Pfaender,
Adolphus Fischer, Fred. Werner, C. Victor Bechmann, Julius Fischer, Adolphus
Forbriger, Charles Strobel, Louis Hoffman, Charles Meininger, Louis Strobel,
Albert Tafel, Henry Esmann, Charles Floto, and Max Wocher.[73]
Headed by Pfaender (who was certainly from the German lands although the
national origins of the others have been obscured by time), the company, which
began operations as an unchartered association in 1856, built a sawmill, hotel,
warehouse, and other infrastructure to help jumpstart the creation of an
ambitious town for German immigrants called New Ulm. The Panic of 1857 and the
socialist utopian ideology of some of the founders hurt the company, however,
which soon sold off its mill and newspaper. It ceased business in 1859 and was
completely dissolved by 1862.[74]New
Ulm, by contrast, survived and to this day relishes its Germanic origins.

Other antebellum corporations with
German in their names (not including place names like Germantown, Pennsylvania,
or German, New York) were the American and German Trading and Insurance Company
(ch. South Carolina, 1835), the German Hebrew Charity Society (ch. Maryland,
1838, and, despite its name, a for-profit concern capitalized at $20,000[75]), the
German Catholic Cemetery Association and the German Catholic Cemetery Society
(also both for-profit and chartered by Ohio on the same day in 1843), the
German Protestant Cemetery (ch. Ohio, 1844), the First German Protestant
Cemetery Association (ch. Ohio, 1845), the Baltimore German Building
Association (ch. Maryland, 1850), the Baltimore German Homestead Association
(ch. Maryland, 1850), the German Catholic St. Stephen Cemetery Association and
the German Evangelical Protestant Cemetery (both again chartered by Ohio on the
same day in 1851), German Mutual Insurance Company (ch. Kentucky, 1856), German
Mutual Life Insurance Company (ch. Missouri, 1857), German Insurance and
Savings Institution (ch. Illinois, 1859), German Saving and Loan (ch. Missouri,
1859), and the German Washington Mutual Association (Kentucky, 1860).

Most antebellum German corporate
entrepreneurs, however, did not self-segregate but rather joined entrepreneurs
of non-Germanic backgrounds to help charter companies. For the most part,
Germans, especially wealthier, better-educated Germans, were more readily
accepted as business partners by Anglo-Americans than blacks, Native Americans,
Irish, Chinese, and various other racial and ethnic groups. At times, the
proverbial American melting pot was evident in the genealogies of individual
incorporators. In 1857, for example, third- or fourth-generation German American
Eli J. Saeger (1818-1888)[76]
helped to found the Bank of Catasauqua in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, and
served as its first president. The bank, which was initially capitalized at
$400,000, survived the Panic of 1857 and converted to national bank status in
1865.[77]
It also survived the Great Depression, merging with First National Bank of
Allentown in 1960.[78]
Other types of “hyphenated Americans” also helped to form this long-lived bank,
including Jonas Biery (1804-1874), the direct descendant (great-grandson) of
Joseph Biery (1703-1768), who moved from Bern, Switzerland, to Pennsylvania in
1739.[79]
Yet another founder, David Thomas (1794-1882), had been born in Wales.[80]

The moving force behind the Bronx
Bleaching and Manufacturing Company, which bleached cloth and dyed fabrics, was
James Bolton, a textile manufacturer who fled Lancashire, England, after a duel
in which he was too successful for the laws of the realm.[81]
One of the three incorporators of the concern, which received a charter from
New York in 1825 and was capitalized at between $25,000 and $50,000, was Peter
H. Schenck (1779-1852).[82]
Of Hessen or New York Dutch ancestry, Schenck was involved in multiple early
textile manufacturing companies, including an unincorporated one that he
organized with John Jacob Astor in 1812.[83]
Bronx Bleaching converted to a partnership in the early 1850s[84]
but thrived until sometime after 1889,[85]
when it relocated to West Farms in the Bronx.[86]

German immigrants or their descendants
were involved in every major sector of the corporate economy – from finance to
manufacturing to transportation – throughout the century and throughout the
country. They did not dominate any branch of industry, except perhaps for
brewing, but they made contributions to almost all of them.[87]
For example, German Americans contributed to the lumber business in Michigan,
Iowa, and elsewhere.[88]
The Black River Lumber Driving and Boom Company, for instance, was established
by Horatio Curts and others in 1854 to move logs down the Black River to mills.
Its capitalization was not mentioned in its charter. In 1864 it became a
subsidiary of the Black River Improvement Company, capitalized at $50,000, and
was owned and controlled largely by the loggers who used it.[89]
The combined companies moved six to seven billion
logs over the first three decades of their existence.[90]
Four of the top 131 lumber-entrepreneurs of the mid-nineteenth century were
German, including Frederick Weyerhaeuser (1834-1914), an émigré from
Nieder-Saulheim in Rhenish Hesse (today part of Rhineland-Pfalz), who founded
the Weyerhauser Timber Company in 1900.[91]
Today, the company, which controls over six million acres of timberland, is the
world’s largest manufacturer of wood and cellulose fibers products, including
paper.

In 1857, Russell E. Hecock,
Volentine Weis (possibly from Bavaria), Michael Kleinherz, and others chartered
the Henry City Bridge Company to bridge the Illinois River. The company
survived into the twentieth century.[92]
The Lemay Ferry Bridge Company of St.
Louis, also formed in 1857, did not fare so well. Originally chartered by
Charles Mehl and others, it was wholly owned by John C. Hall when he passed
away. In 1876, St. Louis and Jefferson counties each paid $5,000 to Hall’s
estate to buy the improvement and make it a free public bridge.[93]

While many German-American corporate
entrepreneurs were involved in the formation of only one company, some, lesser
known and less affluent than John Jacob Astor, helped to charter two or more
companies. In 1831, Aaron Gulick and others chartered the Washington Bridge
Company. Capitalized at $4,000, the company bridged the South River in
Middlesex County and was still operating in 1877, the last toll bridge in the
county.[94]
Although it had been recently repaired, residents considered the structure
rickety and greatly resented the tolls so they pushed the county to buy it.[95]
Gulick was at it again in 1838, helping to charter the Washington Steamboat and
Transportation Company, which possessed an authorized capitalization of between
$4,000 and $25,000.[96]

In 1821, Peter H. Schenck, one of the
founders of the aforementioned Bronx Bleaching, and other individuals incorporated
the Manhattan Fire Insurance Company and capitalized it at $250,000.[97]
It survived the Great Fire of New York in 1835, doubled its capital, and by
1861 had paid $3 million in claims and had an office in Montreal.[98]
In 1864 it doubled its capital again, to $1 million.[99]
The Boston Post that year lauded the
company, calling it an “old and solid corporation” under the direction of “leading
merchants… sure guarantees of stability and good government.”[100]
In the early 1880s, however, it succumbed to excess losses and poor governance.[101]
In the year that he died, 1852, Schenck also helped to charter the Mariners’
Savings Institution of New York. Like other mutual companies, Mariners’
invested safely, largely in first mortgages and bonds issued by the federal,
state, and New York City governments.[102]
Female depositors were welcomed to transact business whenever they saw fit but
only female customers were served on Thursdays between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m.[103]
The institution changed its name to the Metropolitan Savings Bank in 1865[104]
and thrived for more than a century thereafter.[105]

Another serial corporate entrepreneur of
likely Germanic origins, Henry Kayser, helped to form the St. Louis Mutual Fire
and Marine Insurance Company in 1851. The company failed exactly half a century
later when its policies were taken up by Connecticut Fire of Hartford.[106]
Kayser was also involved in the formation of the Citizens’ Mutual Saving Fund
and Loan Association of St. Louis in 1855 and the Carondelet Waterworks
Company, a water utility capitalized at $200,000 when Missouri awarded it a
charter in 1857.[107]

In 1828, Jacob Baer and others
incorporated the Fredericktown Savings Institution. It thrived for over a
century, at one point paying dividends in excess of eight percent; Baer served
as its first president, until being relieved in 1831.[108]
In 1848, Baer and others incorporated the Middletown Savings Institution in
Frederick County. It too long thrived, until at least the Second World War.[109]
In 1853, with the aid of 126 petition signatures,[110]
Baer and others incorporated the Catoctin Savings Institution in Middletown,
Maryland. Unlike Baer’s two earlier banking projects, this institution soon
failed, apparently sometime in the 1860s.[111]

Some antebellum corporations formed with
the aid of German Americans struggled before succumbing to competition, fraud,
financial panics, or other pressures. The New Jersey Navigation Company was
chartered in 1804 with help from John Gulick to connect the Delaware River to
Raritan Bay. The attempt failed,[112]
apparently because the company had difficulty identifying a suitable route[113]
and hence found it impossible to raise sufficient equity funding.[114]

Serial entrepreneur Peter H. Schenck and
others chartered the Galen Salt Company on the Seneca River near Syracuse, New
York, in 1810. Capitalized at $50,000, the company produced “basket-salt”
purported to be “superior to any imported.”[115]
It competed well with the Kanawha salt producers[116]
but because its brine contained “somewhat less than 9% salt” it had difficulty
keeping up with the richer Salina Salt Work brines when they came into
production. The company soon ceased operations.[117]
The failure did not deter Schenck or others who adopted the American mindset of
trying again in another field. Failed corporations were little lamented by
Americans, who long regarded bankruptcy as an invitation to try a new business
elsewhere. As one German traveler put it: “When an entrepreneur goes broke, the
American thinks not of what so many families have lost, only of the creative
achievement of one man’s commercial spirit.”[118]

In 1812, Jacob Schenck and others
obtained a charter for a toll bridge, called the Union Bridge Company, to
bridge New York’s Oswego River. The work remained incomplete in 1820, the time
allotted in the first charter, so the company obtained a two-year extension. By
1821, however, it had given up and obtained permission to sell its charter
privileges to Nehemiah B. Northrop.[119]

Thirty years later, in 1851, Addison A.
Spotts and others chartered the Jeffersonville Savings Bank of Virginia. It
folded before the Civil War began.[120]
So too did the Western New York Agricultural Live Stock Insurance Company,
which Henry H. Rohde (possibly Prussian) helped to charter in April 1852.[121]
The Susquehanna Mutual Life Insurance Company of Harrisburg was
chartered in 1854 with the aid of Charles F. Muench. Despite its name, it was a
joint-stock company with an authorized capital range of $50,000 to $100,000.[122]
The company was shuttered in 1856,[123]
apparently after bad claims and court experiences.[124]

Alexander Kayser (possibly Prussian)
helped to charter the Southern Hotel Company of St. Louis in December 1855.
Capitalized at the audacious sum of $1 million, the company struggled to finish
its building during the Civil War.[125]
The hotel finally opened in December 1865 but the company sold the building to
a major investor, Col. Robert Campbell, the next year. Campbell turned the
hotel into a major destination, perhaps the greatest hotel in the nation,[126]
but the building was destroyed by fire in April 1877. At least a dozen people
lost their lives and Campbell, who was underinsured, lost almost $100,000.[127]

Some antebellum corporations formed with
the aid of one or more German Americans operated at least for a few years
before disappearing for reasons unknown. Horatio
G. Balch helped to charter the Lubec Mining Company of Lubec, Maine, in 1832.
Capitalized at $200,000, this lead mining company remained in business until at
least the Civil War.[128]
In April 1835, George M. Keim and John M. Keim helped to charter the Berks
County Savings Institution, a joint stock savings bank capitalized at $10,000.
By November it had been in operation for four months and had attracted over
$30,000 of deposits.[129] In 1836, Ruliff R. Schenck and others
incorporated the Monmouth Silk Manufacturing Company. Capitalized at $200,000,
the company by 1838 offered a premium of $100 “to the person who could grow the
greatest number of pounds of cocoons.[130]
In 1837, the Dalton Steam Mill,
Manufacturing, and Trading Company built two mills on Nettle Creek and in 1839
it was chartered, with an authorized capital range of from $5,000 to $50,000,
with help from Joseph Routh. Its steam sawmill and gristmill both burned in
1848 and only the former was rebuilt.[131]
Chartered in 1839 by John W. Schmidt and others and capitalized at $250,000,
the Emmet Fire Insurance Company of New York was defunct by the Civil War.[132]

In 1856, Gustavus H. Wetzel (area of origin in the German lands unknown), Charles
Hauser (possibly from Baden-Wurttemberg), Theobald Metzger (possibly from Hesse
or Koenigsheim), Augustus Wierich (from Bremen), and American-born John Lewis
gained a charter from the Wisconsin legislature for the Black River Falls Iron
Company, an iron mining and manufacturing company with an authorized capital
between $20,000 and $100,000.[133]
Wetzel and Wierich soon disassociated themselves from the company, which in
August 1858 borrowed $15,000 from Daniel Koehler and Caspar Bircher.[134] The
note and mortgage were not paid, so Koehler and Henry Pfiffner, who had
purchased Bircher’s interest in the mortgage, sued the corporation in an
attempt to foreclose. Stockholder William M. Hubby appeared before the court
and was allowed to defend the corporation’s interests because the directors
were not present. The court dismissed the bill without prejudice. Koehler and
Pfiffner appealed but lost because conclusive evidence showed that the
corporate seal had been wrongfully affixed to the mortgage. The trial, however,
unearthed evidence that the directors had acted in their own best interests,
and not those of the stockholders or other creditors, by first securing
themselves the sums the corporation owed to its creditors.[135]

Many corporations chartered by German Americans,
by contrast, thrived for decades before folding, merging, or otherwise exiting
business. In
1830, for example, Peter W. Schenck helped to charter the Monmouth Steam Boat
Company. Capitalized at $20,000, the company’s first ship, the Saratoga, offered two-hour connections
between the Highlands, New Jersey and New York City.[136]
In the early days, it docked in front of Schenck’s tavern.[137]
The firm survived the Civil War and indeed the rest of the nineteenth century.[138]

The Firemen’s Insurance Company of Dayton, which Robert C.
Schenck and Peter Baer incorporated in 1835 with an authorized capitalization
of $100,000, survived at least into the late nineteenth century, by which time
its capital had grown to $250,000 plus modest reserves.[139]
It underwrote both fire and marine risks.[140]
One of its long time directors was Jacob Rohrer (1815-unknown), whose ancestors
emigrated from Switzerland to Pennsylvania in the seventeenth century.[141]

In 1842, John B. Schenck helped to
charter the Sycamore Manufacturing Company on Sycamore Creek, a tributary of
the Cumberland River, 23 miles from Nashville in Cheatham County, Tennessee.[142]
With an authorized capitalization ranging from $30,000 to $100,000, the
company, which made blasting and sporting gunpowder, survived the Civil War and
even managed to grow by acquiring equipment from decimated Confederate
manufacturers.[143]
By 1870 it produced 80 kegs per day and its product was considered superior to
that of DuPont and Hazard. By then, its authorized capital had been increased
from $150,000 to $300,000.[144]
It was so successful in the 1870s that several competitors joined forces to try
to destroy it.[145]
The company survived the ordeal by joining with various gunpowder cartel associations.[146]
DuPont eventually swallowed it, however, and shuttered the mills in 1903.[147]

In 1845 William C. Balch and two others
chartered the Ocean Steam Mills to manufacture cloth in Newburyport,
Massachusetts. In fiscal year 1856-1857, the company turned 364,370 pounds of
cotton worth $48,344 into almost 1.9 million yards of printed cloth worth
$89,657.[148]
Originally capitalized at $200,000, the company increased its authorized
capitalization to $360,000 in 1867 to finance a factory enlargement and
additional machinery.[149]
In 1871 it was folded into a new company, the Ocean Mills, which itself was
folded into a new Ocean Steam Mills company in 1878. In 1886, the new concern
joined the Whitefield Mills, which continued to produce cloth until 1889.[150]

In 1846, John H. Schenck and O. H. Schenck helped to charter the
Franklin Hydraulic Company of Ohio. Capitalized at $100,000, it survived the
war and was still generating power for the Harding Paper Company in the 1880s[151]
but may have gone out of business by the end of the century.[152]

When
Kalamazoo, Michigan, needed a cemetery in 1849, Nathaniel A. Balch and others
obtained a charter and created a cemetery that eventually expanded to 28
beautiful hillside acres. Balch remained active in the business for decades, at
least into the late 1870s.[153]
Many of the city’s most prominent residents chose the grounds as their final
resting place. The city government eventually took over the concern in 1940.[154]

Ernst Angelrodt of Tubingen became a
banker and businessman in Hermann, Missouri.[155]
In 1849, he helped to incorporate the Missouri Pacific Railroad with an
authorized capital of $10 million. The line, one of the first west of the
Mississippi, had a long career that required several reorganizations before the
Union Pacific acquired it in the early 1980s.[156]

In 1850, Sydney Schenck and others incorporated the Monmouth
County Plank Road Company, the longest plank road in the region,[157]and
capitalized it at $100,000.[158]
Unlike many plank roads, it survived the Civil War[159]
and the corporation was still paying taxes through the 1880s.[160]

The Jefferson Fire Insurance Company of
Philadelphia was chartered in 1855 by Philip Schmidt, Gustavus Lembert, Robert
Q. Schelmerdine, Peter A. Keyser Jr., Daniel Underkofler, and others and was capitalized
at between $100,000 and $500,000.[161]
(Schmidt was probably German but the national origins of the others are unclear.)
The company survived the Civil War and by 1900 had over $390,000 in assets,
mostly invested in conservative local mortgages, capital of $100,000, and a
surplus over twice that sum. Its revenues were small but it paid dividends
ranging from ten to eighteen percent.[162]

The Point Pleasant Manufacturing Company
of Mason County, Virginia (later West Virginia), was chartered in January 1853
with the aid of James Capehart. Capitalized at between $5,000 and $100,000, the
company survived the Civil War[163]
and remained in operation into the twentieth century. John Fichtner (possibly
from Austria) helped to charter the Somerset County Mutual Fire Insurance Company
in 1855. It moved to Philadelphia in 1894 and changed its name to the
Tradesmen’s Mutual Fire Insurance Company.[164]

In 1859, J. B. Dicker, John
Schmidt, Christian Ploeser, Fredrick Hohenschild, Fredrick Herdacker, Francis
Saler, Christian Mehl, Henry Kattleman, Brannock Jones, B. Schmees, Christian
Steahlin, and F. W. Cronenbold chartered the South St. Louis Mutual Fire and
Marine Insurance Company. It survived the Civil War[165]
but by 1881 was in the process of winding up its affairs.[166]
Also in 1859, Jacob Wirt (possibly from
Hesse) and others of likely German ancestry helped to form the Hanover Gas
Light Company in Pennsylvania. Capitalized at $40,000, the company was still in
operation in 1878 and headed by A. W. Eichelberger. L. F. Melsheimer, one of the
original incorporators, was secretary.[167]
It should not be confused with the gas company of the same name chartered in
New Hampshire in 1860 with help from Adna P. Balch. The latter was dissolved in
1937.[168]

A few antebellum corporations formed with
German help are still in business today. In 1853, for example,
Abraham Shelly, Henry Eberly (Eberle in some sources), Emanuel Cassel, Dr.
Andrew Gerber, Dr. J. L. Zeigler, Jacob Ulrich, Henry Kurtz, Jacob E. Cassel,
Henry S. Myers, Henry Shaffner, and others chartered the Mount Joy Savings
Institutions in Mount Joy, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Capitalized at
$50,000, the bank was first led by Eberly as president and Gerber as treasurer.[169]
It converted to a commercial bank in 1860 when it increased its authorized
capital to $62,500.[170]
In 1865 it converted into a national bank and continued to be led by a strong
contingent of German Americans, including bank president John G. Hoerner and
directors Jacob Reiff and John B. Stehman.[171]
By 1883 it had a capital of $125,000.[172]
It survives to this day as an independent entity called the Union Community
Bank FSB.[173]

Chartered in 1837, the Butchers’ Market
Association in the city of St. Louis is still in operation today.[174]
So too is the Citizens’ Mutual Saving Fund and Loan Association of St. Louis,
which was chartered in 1855.[175]
The St. Louis Phoenix Mutual Saving Fund and Loan Association is also still
active today.[176]
Chartered in 1859 with an authorized capital range of $10,000 to $50,000, the
bank was created with the aid of William Stumpf (who likely hailed from Hesse).[177]

Michael
Reichert helped to form the Farmers’ Mutual Fire Insurance Company of Berks
and Lehigh Counties in 1857. As late as 1912, it remained small, with only
about $6.9 million dollars of insurance in force and cash receipts totaling less
than $15,000 per year.[178]
The company employed German Americans, including collector Eugene Z.
Fenstermacher (1856-1896), the only child of Willoughby Fenstermacher and the
husband of Emma Ziegler.[179]
Headquartered in Kutztown, the insurer survives until this day.[180]

After 1848 an influx of Germans reached
the U.S. after fleeing the German lands following ill-fated revolutions. Many
of the so-called Forty-Eighters were men of high learning and classical liberal
leanings who contributed to American cultural, political, and economic
development in significant ways. Some, known as the “Latin Farmers” due to
their high level of education, turned to farming, though not always
successfully.[181]
Others entered the booming German-language press and book trade,[182]
while still others practiced their professions, including law, medicine,
pharmacology, and theology, or engaged in any of a wide range of artisanal,
commercial (retail and wholesale), or manufacturing pursuits. Engineer Heinrich
Flad, for example, obtained patents for water meters, pressure gauges, street
sprinkler systems, elevators, and other useful new tools.[183]

Unsurprisingly, some of the
Forty-Eighters became corporate entrepreneurs. Rudolf Eickemeyer, a revolutionary
who fled the Kingdom of Bavaria at age seventeen, obtained about 150 patents,
including one for an electric railway motor. He sold[184]
his business to General Electric in 1892.[185]Henry Steinway (1797-1871) (née Heinrich Steinweg), of Brunswick, made a
fortune building pianos. By 1859, his New York factory employed 800 workers and
completed 60 quality pianos a week.[186]
Steinway and Sons continues in business today.[187]

Carl Rietz organized the Charles Rietz
and Brothers Lumber Company of Chicago in 1877 after running a profitable
lumber business in Saginaw, Michigan.[188]
Dr. Karl Mieding became secretary of the Mutual Hail Insurance Company of
Milwaukee.[189]
Born in Koblenz, Forty-Eighter Wilhelm “William” Hexamer (1825-1870) helped to
form the Hoboken and Weehawken Horse Railroad (authorized capitalization
$300,000) in New Jersey in 1860 before joining the Union Army.[190]
After its acquisition by the North Hudson County Railway, the company thrived
until it was taken over by Public Service Railway in the early twentieth
century.[191]

F. C. Konig, of the Rhenish Palatinate (Rhinepfalz), fled the German lands in
1849 and eventually established a soap and candle factory in Peoria, Illinois.[192]
The young son of a revolutionary, Charles A. Schieren (1842-1915), managed to
get into trouble with police in Dusseldorf and in 1856 fled to America with his
father. In 1868, he founded a company bearing his name that made machine
belting in Brooklyn, where he later served a term as mayor from 1893-1895.[193]
Described by contemporaries as “kindly and good-natured,” Schieren also helped
to found the Hide and Leather Bank.[194]

In late March 1860, a group of twenty-one
men, most German-born Forty-Eighters, met at Delmonico’s Restaurant in Lower
Manhattan to establish a life insurance company for German Americans. Led by
Hugo Wesendonck, the company, which called itself Germania Life Insurance
Company until World War I, grew and thrived. Today, it is known as the Guardian
Life Insurance Company of America, a Fortune 500 company.[195]

After the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War
in 1861, Germans continued to immigrate to America in significant numbers. In
fact, immigration peaked in 1882 before dropping off considerably after 1894.[196]
They also continued to contribute greatly to America’s economy, culture, and
what we might call its business of culture and learning. It was in 1861, in
fact, that Prussian pharmacist Friedrich Hoffman moved to the United States
where he fought against patent medicines and other forms of so-called quackery
while enhancing the professional standing of pharmacists in his new country
through entrepreneurial initiatives like his pharmacy and his journal, Pharmaceutische Rundschau.[197]
By 1890, some 800 German-language newspapers were published throughout the
country[198]
and German immigrant theater was an important business and cultural force in
New York and across the nation.[199]
Hugo Munsterberg (1863-1916) of Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland) arrived at Harvard
in 1892 and by his death was perhaps the most famous psychologist in America,
in large part due to his entrepreneurial instincts, flair with the media, and
controversial views on crime, childhood education, industrial psychology, and
other topics of general interest.[200]

Unsurprisingly, newly-arrived Germans, as
well as those who had arrived in the antebellum era, continued to be active in
the nation’s rapidly-expanding corporate sector, especially in German urban
enclaves like Baltimore, Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland,
Detroit, Louisville, Milwaukee, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, Saint
Louis, Saint Paul, and San Francisco.[201]
In San Francisco in 1890, male German immigrants owned forty percent of all
immigrant-owned businesses, more than any other ethnicity. (In terms of
business ownership, female German immigrants ran second only to female Irish
immigrants that year.)[202]
Germans were also active in some of the smaller, industrial cities of the
Northeast like Holyoke, Massachusetts, which was home to the Germania Woolen
Mills controlled by Prussian Rhineland émigré August Strusberg,[203]
and even in out-of-the-way places like Arizona.[204]

Germans like August Belmont, Marcus
Goldman, Abraham Kuhn, Henry Lehman, Joseph Sachs, Joseph Seligman, James
Speyer, Jacob H. Schiff, and Felix Warburg eventually rivaled John Jacob Astor
in fame – and wealth – by selling financial services like securities issuance
and brokerage to the national government and the country’s largest and most
important corporations. Their descendants dominated Wall Street well into the
twentieth century with the help of newcomers like Henry Kaufman, who arrived as
a boy in the 1930s.[205]Henry Villard, the nephew of two Forty-Eighters,[206]
helped to develop the Columbian River region of the Pacific Northwest before
becoming president of Edison General Electric Company in 1889. He expressed
gratitude for “the incomparable advantages arising from the free play of the
human faculties enjoyed in this country.”[207]

Claus Spreckels (1828-1905) of Hanover
was perhaps the most successful German immigrant entrepreneur of the late
nineteenth century. He died with an estate worth roughly $50 million, gained
largely from his interests in Hawaiian cane sugar, California beet sugar, and
in vertical and horizontal cognates like sugar refining, transportation, power,
mass media, real estate, finance, and beer, almost all of which involved
corporation formation, mergers, and other forms of corporate entrepreneurship.[208]

Not all postbellum German
entrepreneurship, however, was directed into high finance or urban industry.
John Gottfried Cullmann, for example, incorporated the North Alabama Land
Company in January 1886 and capitalized it at $150,000.[209]
Two years later, he reorganized his company as the North Alabama Land and
Immigration Company (NALIC) and increased its capitalization to $2 million.[210]
Born in Bavaria in 1823, Cullmann came to America in 1865 to avoid his
creditors. The area of north-central Alabama in which his company operated was
eventually named Cullman in his honor. By 1906, despite the area’s relatively
poor soils, the company had colonized the region with several thousand Germans
and a smattering of immigrants from other European nations. Cullmann counted
his company a success but he did not grow wealthy from the venture and other
land developers attracted more Germans to the South than he did.[211]

In
1910, scores of corporations operating in the collection districts of Montana,
Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio,
Oregon, Pennsylvania, and South Dakota that paid a special corporate excise to
the Internal Revenue Service[212] had some
variant of the word "German" in their names that was not related to a
place name like Germantown. (See Appendix B for the names of 133 of them,
listed alphabetically by collection district.[213]
Of course many other German-owned or German-run corporations, like Kaspare Cohn
Commercial and Savings Bank of California, did not choose to include the word
German in their names.)[214] The vast majority of those corporations must have
had a strong connection to Germany. They cannot be traced further, however,
because many, like Germania Life and the German Insurance Company
of Louisville, changed their names
during the Great War to avoid negative publicity. Of course, if the antebellum
pattern continued after the Civil War, and there is no reason to suspect that
it did not, many Germans helped to found or capitalize corporations in
cooperation with Anglo, Irish, French and other “hyphenated Americans.” And
some all-German companies, like the Jefferson Mutual Fire Insurance Company
organized in St. Louis in March 1861, decided not to explicitly advertise their
Germanic roots.[215]

In the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, Germans comprised the largest non-English-speaking group of
immigrants to America but they hardly dominated demographically. Between 1850
and 1920, German-born inhabitants comprised only between three and four percent
of the total U.S. population.[216]
Germans’ impact on the nation’s economy, especially its developing corporate
sector, however, appears outsized. It is well known that Germans and their
descendants in America formed large numbers of voluntary associations in the
second half of the nineteenth century[217]
and that German immigrants and/or investors significantly aided the development
of other nations, including Brazil, Canada, France (particularly Alsace-Lorraine),
Mexico, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Russia, and Spain.[218]
We can confidently add the United States to that list even though we cannot yet
measure precisely the impact of German Americans on U.S. corporate development.
With the current state of technology, it would be very costly to attempt a more
precise reconstruction of German inputs into the development of America’s
corporate sector in the nineteenth century and due to lost sources (e.g.,
stockholder lists) a complete reconstruction will never be possible. But the available
evidence clearly shows evidence of Germans throughout the corporate economy.
Germans were everywhere within corporate America, from the smallest depositors
in German-controlled savings banks, to the founders of the nation’s largest and
most important corporate behemoths, to the partners in the greatest investment
banking houses of Wall Street. Germans appear to have contributed more to the
development of America’s system of corporate entrepreneurship than their
population share would suggest, certainly compared to immigrant and ethnic
groups that encountered deeper prejudices and more barriers to corporation
formation and investment.

[4] German farmers
often ended up poorer than Yankee farmers working similar ground because they
had more children on average in an effort to ensure ownership continuity.
Germans also tended to take fewer leveraged risks but they innovated in sundry
ways nonetheless. Edward V. Carroll and Sonya Salamon, “Share and Share Alike:
Inheritance Patterns in Two Illinois Farm Communities,” Journal of Family History 13 (April 1988): 219-132; Terje Joranger,
“The Migration Tradition: Land Tenure and Culture in the U.S. Upper Mid-West,” European Journal of American Studies 2.1
(2008): 2-16.

[5] Robert S. Davis,
“The Old World in the New South: Entrepreneurial Ventures and the Agricultural
History of Cullman County, Alabama,” Agricultural
History 79.4 (Autumn 2005): 439-461.

[7] Paula M. Nelson, After the West Was Won: Homesteaders and
Town-Builders in Western South Dakota, 1900-1917 (Iowa City: University of
Iowa Press, 1986), 52-53.

[8] Herbert S. Schell,History of South Dakota 4th
ed. (Pierre: South Dakota State Historical Society Press, 2004), 116-119. Established
states did likewise and all were guilty of “boosterism” to varying degrees.
Jocelyn Wills, Boosters, Hustlers, and
Speculators: Entrepreneurial Culture and the Rise of Minneapolis and St. Paul,
1849-1883 (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2005), 113.

[9] Shirley Cochell and George Beine, Land of the Coyote (Ames: Iowa State
University Press, 1972), 144.

[10] Grace Fairchild
and Walker D. Wyman, Frontier Woman: The
Life of a Woman Homesteader on the Dakota Frontier (River Falls: University
of Wisconsin-River Falls Press, 1972), 43-44.

[16] James Lester
Sturm, Investing in the United States,
1798-1893: Upper Wealth-Holders in a Market Economy (New York: Arno Press,
1977); Robert E. Wright, Origins of Commercial Banking in America, 1750-1800
(Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001); Robert E. Wright, Hamilton
Unbound: Finance and the Creation of the American Republic (Westport,
Conn.: Praeger, 2002); Robert E. Wright, The Wealth of Nations Rediscovered:
Integration and Expansion in American Financial Markets, 1780-1850 (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Robert E. Wright, The First Wall
Street: Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, and the Birth of American Finance
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Robert E. Wright, One Nation Under Debt: Hamilton, Jefferson,
and the History of What We Owe (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008).

[17] John J. McCusker
and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British
America, 1607-1789 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985),
228.

[21] Carl Wittke, Refugees of Revolution: The German
Forty-Eighters in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1952), 191-202.

[22] Fred Bateman and
Thomas Weiss, A Deplorable Scarcity: The
Failure of Industrialization in the Slave Economy (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1981), 90; Mischa Honeck, We Are the Revolutionists: German-Speaking Immigrants and American
Abolitionists After 1848 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 1-5.

[43] John Majewski,
“Toward a Social History of the Corporation: Shareholding in Pennsylvania,
1800-1840,” in The Economy of Early
America: Historical Perspectives and New Directions, ed. Cathy Matson
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 294-316.

[44] For similar
comments related to completely a full blown social history of German
immigrants, see Farley Grubb, German
Immigration, 399.

[45] Doron S. Ben-Atar,Trade Secrets: Intellectual Piracy and
the Origins of American Industrial Power (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2004), 103-9; Scharf, History of Western
Maryland, 596.

[46] Norman Ware, The Industrial Worker, 1840-1860: The
Reaction of American Industrial Society to the Advance of the Industrial
Revolution (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1964), 196-197, 236.

[58] Robert E.
Shalhope, The Baltimore Bank Riot:
Political Upheaval in Antebellum Maryland (Chicago: University of Illinois
Press, 2009); Reverdy Johnson and John Glenn, Reply to a Pamphlet Entitled “A Brief Exposition of Matters Relating to
the Bank of Maryland,” with an Examination Into Some of the Causes of the
Bankruptcy of That Institution (Baltimore: Jas. Lucas & E. K. Deaver,
1834).

[67] “Appel Family of
German Descent,” http://boards.ancestry.com/surnames.appel/117.119.163.202.203/mb.ashx (accessed May 19,
2013); Harriet and Fred Rochlin, Pioneer
Jews: A New Life in the Far West (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1984), 146;
Sidney De Long, The History of Arizona:
From the Earliest Times Known to the People of Europe to 1903 (San
Francisco: Whitaker & Ray Company, 1905), 73; John Boessenecker, When Law Was in the Holster: The Frontier
Life of Bob Paul (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012), 171, 430.

[69] Thomas E.
Sheridan, Landscapes of Fraud: Mission
Tumacacori, the Baca Float, and the Betrayal of the O’Odham (Phoenix:
University of Arizona Press, 2006), 12, 117-119; Rachel St. John, Line in the Sand: A History of the Western
U.S.-Mexico Border (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 66; Jim
Turner, Arizona: A Celebration of the
Grand Canyon State (Layton, Utah: Gibbs Smith, 2011), 129.

[70] Approximately $2.7
to $13.4 million and $16.9 million, respectively, in 2011$.

[77] James E. Barnett, Finances of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania
for the Year Ending November 30, 1900 (Harrisburg: Wm. Stanley Ray, 1901),
251; James Lambert and Henry Reinhard, A
History of Catasauqua in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania (Allentown, Pa.:
Searle and Dressler, 1914), 180-186. Approximately $10.6 million in 2013$.

[108]Fredericktown Savings Institution, One
Hundred Years of Successful Banking: Fredericktown Savings Institution,
Frederick, Md. -- 1828-1928: A Sketch of the Origin of an Institution that Has
Rendered a Century of Valuable Banking Service in Frederick and Vicinity
(Fredericktown: Marken & Bielfeld, 1928); Scharf, History of Western Maryland, 543.

[117] Frederick J. H.
Merrill, “Salt and Gypsum Industries of New York,” Bulletin of the New York State Museum 3.1 (April 1893), 18; W. H.
McIntosh, “History of the Town of Butler” (1877), http://wayne.nygenweb.net/butler/butlerhistory1.html (accessed May 3,
2013); Hamilton Child, Gazetteer and
Business Directory of Wayne County, N.Y. (Syracuse: Journal Office, 1867),
57.

[119] Adelaide R. Hasse,Index of Economic Material in Documents
of the States of the United States: New York (Washington: Carnegie
Institution, 1907), 84; The Revised
Statutes of New York (Albany: Packard and Van Benthuysen, 1829), 3: 644.

[126] William R. Nester,From Mountain Man to Millionaire: The
“Bold and Dashing Life” of Robert Campbell (Columbia, Mo.: University of
Missouri Press, 2011), 237-238.

[127] “Southern Hotel,” http://genealogyinstlouis.accessgenealogy.com/hotels.htm (accessed 4 May 4,
2013); J. Thomas Scharf, A History of St. Louis City and County, From the
Earliest Periods to the Present Day: including Biographical Sketches of
Representative Men (Philadelphia:
L. H. Everts & Co., 1883). Approximately $2.2 million in 2011$.

[128] “Marriages: Mr.
John Lubec to Miss Mary Jane Rice,” Hancock County, Maine Ellsworth Herald, February 15, 1861. Approximately $5.4 million in
2011$.

[129]Journal of the Senate of the Commonwealth of
Pennsylvania (Harrisburg: Crabb & Barrett, 1835), 129. Approximately
$813, 000 in 2011$.

[131] Andrew W. Young, History of Wayne County, Indiana, From Its
First Settlement to the Present Time (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke & Co.,
1872), 207; History of Wayne County,
Indiana Together with Sketches of Its Cities &c. (Chicago: Inter-State
Publishing Co., 1884), 431. Approximately $125,000 to $1.3 million in 2011$.

[132] J. H. French and
Frank Place, Gazetteer of the State of
New York (R. Pearsall Smith, 1859), 86. Approximately $6.2 million in
2011$.

[167] William Wallace
Goodwin, Directory of Gas Light Companies
and Their Officers in the United States, Canadas, South America and Cuba 3rd
ed. (Philadelphia: William W. Goodwin & Co., 1878), 95. Approximately $1.1
million in 2011$.

[168]Laws of New Hampshire (1860), 2,327; Laws of New Hampshire (1937), 534.

[178] Insurance in force
is the sum total of the face value of all policies in effect and in most
instances is many multiples of an insurer’s assets or capital. “Growth of Life
and Fire Insurance Business Here,” Reading
Eagle, January 28, 1905; Thirty-Ninth
Annual Report of the Insurance Commissioner of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania
(Harrisburg: C. E. Aughinbaugh, 1912), 1,024-1025. Approximately $165 million
in 2011$.

[191] A. H. Ringler, History of the North County Railway from Its
Earliest Days to the Present Time (West Hoboken, N.J.: North Hudson County
Railway, 1893); “North Hudson County Railway,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Hudson_County_Railway (accessed
September 10, 2013); Garret D. W. Vroom, Reports
of Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court and, At Law, in the Court
of Errors and Appeals of the State of New Jersey (Trenton: William S.
Sharp, 1880), 73.

[194] “Charles A.
Schieren’s Career: A Successful Business Man, Public-Spirited Citizen, and
Earnest Reformer,” New York Times,
October 15, 1893.

[195] Anita Rapone, The Guardian Life Insurance Company,
1860-1920: A History of a German-American Enterprise (New York: New York
University Press, 1987); Robert E. Wright and George David Smith, Mutually Beneficial: The Guardian and Life
Insurance in America (New York: New York University Press, 2004); Wittke, Refugees of Revolution, 62, 277, 304,
309.

[196] Sean Cashman, America in the Gilded Age: From the Death of
Lincoln to the Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, 3rd ed. (New York: New York
University Press, 1993), 74-75; Grubb, German
Immigration, 377.

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